Different MSG appliances offer and combine a router with a AAA, portal, prepay, and billing system into a ready-to-deploy gateway that can manage & monetize Wi-Fi in hotels, universities, colleges, schools, airports, cafes, hospitals, convention centers, markets, shopping malls, and other public venues.
Hotspot users can log in in multiple ways, including a redirected web page with custom branding for each venue. Also supported are one-time-passwords (OTP) sent over SMS to verify the mobile phone identity of customers. The gateway also provides a self-service portal for hotspot customers to recharge their accounts and view various statistics.
The MSG can concurrently handle multiple business cases. Free users can be verified via OTP and be limited on time or download volume. Prepay physical or virtual vouchers can be used to charge for services where either cash is paid at a venue or online credit card payment is accepted. MSG also supports monthly or longer-term customer plans with postpaid invoices being sent to customers.
The L-Series networking features include L2-L3 flow classification, IP routing, NAT (SNAT ), policy routing, walled garden, IP & web Filtering Firewall and multi-ISP link load balancing with failover. Customers can directly plug in an ISP connection and Wi-Fi network to launch their hotspot services.
NAT logs are maintained directly on the gateway, making it easy to respond to lawful agencies who wish to identify which customers were browsing from which IP address(es).